There’s No Scrabble Like Sexy Scrabble

The rules of Sexy Scrabble are that every word you make has to be sexual, or at least suggestive, or as a matter of last resort, of general vulgarity. Approval of words is obviously not obtained by referring to the official Scrabble dictionary, but is solely subject to the opinion of the vile rabble with whom you are playing.

And so it was that we converged on Yish’s house two Saturdays ago to forget that we were actually mature sophisticated well-educated 24-year-olds, and, at least for an evening, to be puerile 17-year-olds again.

The major insight we gained from the experience was that for a good game of Sexy Scrabble, ordinary Scrabble rules must be very liberally interpreted, if applied at all, and the English language must be forced into all manner of compromising positions.

In our first game, adding letters to words already on the board to make some sort of phrase or sentence was permitted. In this way, Yish was permitted to transform DICK into DICKME. My later attempt to make VINDICKME was, however, rejected. My outrage at this was somewhat mollified when my later proposal to adapt MANGA into MANGAZE was accepted. Through a similar process, the slightly more surreal sequence of TWIGGY -> BADTWIGGY -> RIMBADTWIGGY -> PRIMBADTWIGGY -> IMPRIMBADTWIGGY was obtained.

The traditional approach of not revealing your intended words to the other players also gave way in pursuit of the common good. When Jianyi tried to use an A on the board to make JAW, Fay insisted that she needed it for her FANNY. When we all agreed that the presence of FANNY on the board was of vital importance, Jianyi had no choice but to produce JAWSEMEN instead, which was mutated by others later on to INJAWSEMEN and FOULINJAWSEMEN.

In our second game, we decided to try something a little classier. In this spirit, Yish started us off with BEGET, and I followed with AROUSE. This new classy version of sexy Scrabble soon proved to be dead boring and was soon abandoned in favour of transforming LOVER to TOELOVER, and RANDY to ISORANDY to OMISORANDY, which seemed like a good place to call it a night.

our bawdy board

Respect His Authoritah

I was also intending to write about Peter Kruder at the Heineken Green Room Sessions yesterday, but we got bored when he got a bit too acid-jazzy for our tastes, and went to Phuture instead, where I informed some tall drunk loser who looked all of 17 that if he wanted to use my bum as a grinding surface, he should probably give me some fucking flattery first.

After moving further into the crowd and getting Dom to take her cap off so that the loser couldn’t find us again, I was ambushed by a sudden and unexpected epiphany about Ludacris’s Southern Hospitality: it is the shit.

I’ve always had a thing for authoritative MCing – Chuck D is the obvious example to trot out here, and is probably the reason for this fetish in the first place, given that Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions is the first rap album I ever bought. Other MCs who float my “authoritative” boat are KRS-One and Roots Manuva, but I never really paid much attention to Ludacris. He’s always just been there, another of those people halfway down my “too much music, too little time” list, but when “Cadillac GRI-LLS, Cadillac MI-LLS, check out the oil my Cadillac SPI-LLS” (look, I didn’t say he was a poet, I just said he sounds authoritative when he raps) blasted out of the club speakers, multiple Michelle rap buttons were pushed.

The other thing that really does it for me in this song is the way the last word in each line is (only just) after the beat instead of right smack on it. I can’t quite describe why it makes such a big difference for me, but rapping with words smack on the beat reminds me of the Beastie Boys (eg. “Don’t! You! ask me to SMILE! I’ll stick around and make it worth your WHILE! etc.”), who I (shock! horror!) quite often find boring.

The last thing that really gets my booty shaking in this song (and quite a lot of others) is its extreme misogyny, but I can’t quite explain that in any rational way. I just derive wild joy from yelling “All my women in the house if you chasing cash, and you got some big titties wit a matching ass.” It probably has something to do with feeling empowered in my female sensuality or whatever.

Faye Wong, Singapore Indoor Stadium, 2 June 2004

For the sake of the ang mohs reading this who are even more clueless about Faye Wong than I am, the quick overview is that she’s a hugely famous Chinese singer whose success and popularity is surprising given the relatively adventurous nature of her music (relative to the world of Chinese pop music, that is), but perhaps less surprising given that she is very beautiful and has the voice of an angel. Musically, I’d describe her sound as Dolores O’Riordan meeting Sarah McLachlan at a Teresa Teng concert attended briefly by Bebel Gilberto, but in a good way, apart from when she does the awful Dolores-stylie banshee-keening. I’m sensing disbelief. I’ll move on.

I’ve never heard a fast Chinese pop song that didn’t suck, and unfortunately that trend mostly continued for me during this concert. Her ballads are generally enjoyable because they showcase her exceptional singing ability, but the fast songs sound like I could throw them together in ten minutes with a shitty synthesizer and some bog-standard trance samples. The only exception was a song which is either called Kai Dao Tu Mi or Tian Dao Tu Mi or Kai Dao Tu Ling (look, when you don’t understand what something means, it’s hard to remember exact wordings, okay?) which is very much like Tori Amos when she started experimenting with beats on From The Choirgirl Hotel. Feisty tune, snazzily performed, fun touches like singing through a megaphone so her voice sounds like a raspy vocoder, and interesting, thank God.

But let’s move on to the ballads, because they’re really what get those multi-coloured lightsticks in the audience swaying arrhythmically in the air, and inspire those screams of “WANG FEI! WANG FEI!”

[Why do Chinese audiences shout out the artist’s full name? This is so odd, it’s like going to an English gig and yelling “JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE!” or “WEIRD AL YANKOVIC!” I mean, in other concerts I’ve attended, I certainly never bothered with “Jackson” when I was screaming “I LOVE YOU MICHAEL!”, and my secondary three form teacher didn’t bother to add a “Bon Jovi” when she yelled “FUCK ME JON!” either.]

So anyway, she sang Tian Kong and Dan Yuan Ren Chang Jiu and Wo Yuan Yi and Hong Dou and Xiao Wang Shu and Ren Jian, which was very nice, because they are among the 17 songs of hers that I actually know. She also sang some cover versions with varying success – The Cranberries’ Dreams (fine until the banshee-keening bit, which is dreadful no matter who sings it), The Look Of Love (unexpected, but actually quite nice and Bebel Gilberto-y) and Tori’s Silent All These Years, which seems to be the most successful crossover English song ever in the Chinese pop world, given the number of Chinese pop chicks who keep covering it.

[I asked Terry if they retained the meaning of the Silent All These Years lyrics when they translated it to Chinese. “Of course not,” said Terry, “in Chinese music nothing is about domestic abuse; everything is about breakups.”]

The thing about Faye Wong is that you don’t have to know her songs or understand the lyrics to enjoy her concert, because most of the time, her amazing voice is enough. Depending on the song, she can showcase the rich vibrato of a traditional Chinese chanteuse, she can do the playful delicacy of a funny Broadway number, and she can do the sort of modern balladeering that Sarah McLachlan used to do well and Dido still wishes she could do well. At the end of the day, that voice bridges the gap of my ignorance and my cultural condescension, and is all I ultimately need as explanation of her richly-deserved fame.

Karma Debt

On Friday I watched a (magnificent) media preview of Mahler’s 8th symphony. The actual concerts on Saturday and Sunday had been sold out for weeks. Debbie was singing in the chorus, and managed to get me entry to this.

Tomorrow I am going to a Faye Wong concert, sitting in a $125 seat for which I will have paid $20. Esther is not using her tickets for some reason, and offered them to me.

After that I will be going to see Peter Kruder DJ at Zouk, for free, because Dominique is a member of the Heineken Green Room Sessions thingy (I’m not a member, never bothered to try and become one). I’m not actually a big fan of his, but the crucial point about getting into this for free is that I can also pop into Phuture for my hip-hop fix if I get bored.

None of this came about through any effort of mine, the offers mostly just dropped in my lap, and I took them up. I think I owe the cosmos a couple of random good deeds, and certain people some very fancy coffees at the very least.

Mahler’s 8th Symphony, Esplanade Concert Hall, Singapore, 28 May 2004

I spent Friday night at the most crazy-ass ambitious musical event I have ever witnessed. They’re opening the Singapore Arts Festival with 400 people performing Mahler’s 8th Symphony, and thanks to Debbie, I got to attend the media preview.

I’ve always loved Mahler because he’s such a drama queen, and this symphony didn’t disappoint. By the end of it the audience has been buffetted from side to side like leaves in the wind by superpower choir, mad trombones and walls of orchestra noise. In a good way! I could write more about why I think the performance was musically damn good, but it would almost certainly sound like pretentious bollocks, so all I will say is that everyone involved in this should be bloody proud, and everyone who was lucky enough to get tickets to this before it sold out should be bloody thankful.

Fare-Fucking-Well

My exam results arrived a few days ago, and I can at last confirm that my wasted year is finally, gloriously over. No more lectures which substitute Powerpoint presentations for actual imparting of ideas, no more constant cringing at people speaking in accents which are part-English, part-American, part-Singaporean and COMPLETELY annoying, and generally no longer having to be in a university I do not give a damn about and never will.

There were always many reasons why doing my law degree in London was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, but until this year, those reasons were never academic. I didn’t choose UCL because I thought it would give me a superior legal education to NUS, but I spent most of this DipSing year thanking my lucky stars for that choice. So goodbye, NUS. May we never meet again.

She’s Lost Control Again

This week’s Breezeblock show has an even higher hit:miss ratio than usual, although the Knifehandchop live session should be skipped if you’re prone to nosebleeds. I started making a list of the good tracks but got tired of it because I was pretty much just adding every track. Can anyone out there be a lovely geek saviour and tell me how to record RealAudio streams and convert them to mp3?

Django’s offer of 25% off new CDs AND free shipping for new CD orders over $25 was just too good to resist.

  • Low and Dirty Three: In The Fishtank ($8.78)
  • TV On The Radio: Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes ($9.58)
  • Mogwai: Ten Rapid ($9.58)
  • Diverse: One A.M. ($11.18)
  • Explosions In The Sky: Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place ($11.98)

Wheeeee!

[Random question: does anyone find my frequent use of lyrics/song titles as blog entry titles pretentious?]

The Reader (Bernhard Schlink): Excerpt

From Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader:

“What happened at the selections?”

Hanna described how the guards had agreed among themselves to tally the same number of prisoners from their six equal areas of responsibility, ten each and sixty in all, but that the figures could fluctuate when the number of sick was low in one person’s area of responsibility and high in another’s, and that all the guards on duty had decided together who was to be sent back.

“None of you held back, you all acted together?”

“Yes.”

“Did you not know that you were sending the prisoners to their death?”

“Yes, but the new ones came, and the old ones had to make room for the new ones.”

“So because you wanted to make room, you said you and you and you have to be sent back to be killed?”

Hanna didn’t understand what the presiding judge was getting at.

“I…I mean…so what would you have done?” Hanna meant it as a serious question. She did not know what she should or could have done differently, and therefore wanted to hear from the judge, who seemed to know everything, what he would have done.

Everything was quiet for a moment. It is not the custom at German trials for defendants to question the judges. But now the question had been asked, and everyone was waiting for the judge’s answer. He had to answer; he could not ignore the question or brush it away with a reprimand or a dismissive counterquestion. It was clear to everyone, it was clear to him too, and I understood why he had adopted an expression of irritation as his defining feature. It was his mask. Behind it, he could take a little time to find an answer. But not too long; the longer he took, the greater tension and expectation, and the better his answer had to be.

“There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one can distance oneself from, if the price is not life and limb.”

Perhaps this would have been all right if he had said the same thing, but referred directly to Hanna or himself. Talking about what “one” must and must not do and what it costs did not do justice to the seriousness of Hanna’s question. She had wanted to know what she should have done in her particular situation, not that there are things that are not done. The judge’s answer came across as hapless and pathetic. Everyone felt it. They reacted with sighs of disappointment and stared in amazement at Hanna, who had more or less won the exchange. But she herself was lost in thought.

“So should I have…should I have not…should I not have signed up at Siemens?”

It was not a question directed at the judge. She was talking out loud to herself, hesitantly, because she had not yet asked herself that question and did not know whether it was the right one, or what the answer was.

[The reference to signing up at Siemens is to her signing up with the SS when it recruited workers from the Siemens factory where she had been working.]

Boats, Floats, Horses, Courses, Strokes, Folks

When you’re this bored and depressed and permanently sweaty, blogging anything more eloquent than a series of blehs becomes quite a challenge. I could regale you with thrilling tales of my afternoons on the couch watching whatever’s on Animal Planet (generally, too many proboscis monkeys), or go off on a rant about how Jamie Cullum makes jazz for lobotomy patients, or make dark statements about how if Fantasia Barrino doesn’t win American Idol there will be no truth, beauty or justice left in this world, but I really think it’s better for everyone if I do one of those links-as-substitutes-for-real-content posts, don’t you?

Here are some about porn.

I found this dictionary of Japanese porn perversions through Tamara’s livejournal, but it really needs to be shared with the world. To give you an idea of what’s apparently available to the average Japanese porn consumer, Fundoshi (women in traditional Sumo g-strings rolling around giving each other “really harsh wedgies”) is I guess fairly understandable, Pantsu To Kao involves putting panties which are several sizes too small over someone’s face so that they squish the nose, Shokku-shu kei involves tentacles, and Unagi (eels) may quite possibly no longer be my favourite Japanese dish.

People who know me should not be surprised that my favourite entries in The 100 Worst Porn Movie Titles are the ones that involve really bad puns (on Hollywood movie titles). To this effect, I offer you “Big Trouble In Little Vagina” and “Sperms Of Endearment”. However, I acknowledge that some people may find more esoteric joys in “Let’s Play Anal Twister”, “Airtight Granny” and “Beyond The Valley Of The Ultra Milkmaids”.

Alec once told me a Simpsons quote where Homer meets Billy Corgan at some rock festival. Billy says “Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins”. Homer says “Homer Simpson, smiling politely.” The alternate title for this post should probably be “Michelle’s Readers, Smiling Politely.”

Home Bittersweet Home

Perhaps some of you may wonder if walking through the Heathrow departure lounge trying to stop sobbing gets any easier the second time round. It doesn’t. You can deal with it differently – I hid behind the Telegraph until the plane was well into the air this time, instead of pressing myself against the window shuddering – but either way, things get soggy.

* * *

I got home having had no or very little sleep due to the two louts behind me who spent most of the London-Bangkok flight loudly telling a Thai woman about their girlfriends in Thailand (Graham has two, Ashley only has one, I think), and later due to the need to not fall asleep in Bangkok airport and miss my transfer. My mother then informed me that it was my Sunday obligation to attend 6 pm mass instead of the solemnization ceremony later that day of the wedding of one of my oldest and dearest friends. Never mind that I had deliberately shortened my initially planned holiday just so that I could be at her wedding. Apparently, Pei Ee would “understand” me missing the most important part of the wedding since I would be present at the big banquet later which is usually far more meaningful to a couple’s parents than the couple themselves.

An argument, much stress, and a tearful call to Alec later, I took the drastic step of text messaging Pei Ee seeking confirmation that no, she would not fucking “understand”. Confirmation came in the form of Pei Ee actually sending her bridal car to pick me up from my home and take me to Sentosa. Within half an hour, I wriggled into my dress, threw stockings, makeup and hair products into a bag, and rode to Sentosa in the front seat.

* * *

Attending a wedding just hours after parting from Alec at the departure gates was never going to be easy. This poem was read at the wedding dinner, and I hope the couple will forgive me for co-opting it to describe my own feelings.

Love
And in Life’s noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart’s Self-solace and soliloquy.
You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within;
And to the leading Love-throb in the Heart
Thro’ all my Being, thro’ my pulse’s beat;
You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light,
Like the fair light of Dawn, or summer Eve
On rippling Stream, or cloud-reflecting Lake.
And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,
How oft! I bless the Lot that made me love you.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

* * *

As I was leaving the dinner later that night, I shook Tjin Kai’s hand meaning to congratulate him and say something merry. All I managed was “Take care of her” before I started tearing up and hastily moved on out of the ballroom. It might just have been residual waters from what I had already shed that weekend, but I’d like to think it had nothing to do with me, or the man I had had to leave behind at Heathrow, or the old life I had briefly lived again in London only to have to abandon once more. I think it was just about Pei Ee, the gem of a friend who I have loved for 18 years and is now blissfully happy. Congratulations, Pei Ee and Tjin Kai. I wish you all the love and joy in the world.